Even though OpenAI showed off a similar feature first, Google is set to make it more available to a much wider potential audience sooner.
Google sometimes feels like it’s playing catchup in the generative AI race to rivals such as Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral — but not anymore.
Today, the company leapfrogged most others by announcing Gemini Live, a new voice mode for its AI model Gemini through the Gemini mobile app, which allows users to speak to the model in plain, conversational language and even interrupt it and have it respond back with the AI’s own humanlike voice and cadence. Or as Google put it in a post on X: “You can now have a free-flowing conversation, and even interrupt or change topics just like you might on a regular phone call.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because OpenAI in May demoed its own “Advanced Voice Mode” for ChatGPT which it openly compared to the talking AI operating system from the movie Her, only to delay the feature and begin to roll it out only selectively to alpha participants late last month.
Gemini Live is now available in English on the Google Gemini app for Android devices through a Gemini Advanced subscription ($19.
